aisyalam

It has been awhile since I’ve created of a complex interface, and I forgot how difficult doing so (effectively) really is. Revamping my NJIT page is somewhat of a warm-up, reminding me of the process, but making a home page isn’t quite in the same league, at least for me, as designing and organizing a variety of materials on a poetic arts CD-ROM or “e-book,” which are the 2 projects I’m tackling at this point.

When I met with Vincent Oria, NJIT’s multimedia database specialist at, he told me that developing the interface was the most important, crucial, and difficult aspect of making mm databases, which is my long term goal. These little projects do seem like appropriate practice for the greater invention, and not very easy either!

For the Technopoetry Rising project, a couple of months ago I made a prototype CD-ROM that basically indexed the works I wanted to include. I used text and basic html to harness everything together. Were I to allow it to be as easy as that, this part of the publication would already be in the can. But who would I be to take the easy way out? Words of course will still be part of the presentation (i.e., there will be an alphanumeric site map tucked in somewhere), and I started today’s work (and to some degree continued yesterday’s) with a font study: looking at various fonts and sites of font sellers on the web (like fontseek.com, myfonts.com, linotype.com). Of course there are thousands of typefaces out there, but was able to find a few fonts I liked (on a completely subjective level). I don’t think making Flash intros to each of the 3 sections (images from essays, audio files, multimedia poems) will add anything, so the task is to use images, symbols, etc. to announce, index, organize the information in each section. Then, naturally, there are sections within sections – like the multimedia section has video, html, and Flash works. & what is the best way to represent the images, which won’t be appearing (as they typically do) in the book? Lucio Agra (who is closely involved with the project) has suggested some sort of slide show, which’ll probably be how the pictures will be shown. Yet another, among many other tasks involved…

Transforming the book into an e-book will be interesting. The contents will be more or less the same, but the presentation very different. Unlike some of my comrades, like Brian Stefans, I’ve hardly worked at all with pdfs, which is how the writing (23 different sections, including essays, poems, bibliography, etc) will be prepared and presented; I’ve got a bit to learn on that end. The media files are all complete and ready to go, thankfully. Since I’m hoping the e-book is going to be published here at MMU, I plan to be collaborating with some of my colleagues on the production – although the new term has just begun and everyone’s been to busy to consult with so far. Their input will be valued immensely I’m sure.

Well, I found some images (of mine) that I may be able to use as image maps, and made some sketches of other design ideas as well. I’m giving myself another 6-7 days to get working versions of both projects together, & we’ll see how what I can do with them…

Putting these two projects definitely involves a massive amount of organization, which also worked on quite a bit today (making separate folders for each program, dumping old and non-ms files into secondary folders, and so on). I always tell my students that they have to be extremely organized, and it does really help, even if it is not always the easiest or most pleasurable aspect of the work.

Anyhow, I’m feeling a bit geekish – in most ways this sort of work is totally solitary, really unexciting, and completely unglamorous. That’s just how it is these days.

Tomorrow night I’ll be at MMU’s annual awards dinner – the invitation for which recommends that everyone wear the school’s colors (blue & red). The event’s being held a couple of kilometers up the road at the Cyberview Lodge, and apparently the former Prime Minister of Malaysia (Malathir) will be there, as his wife is the Chancellor of MMU. Anyhow, this event should be quite interesting, and may keep me offline for the evening…